Apparently the Attensa toolbars we introduced more than a year ago for tagging, identifying, previewing and subscribing to feeds and our tagging toolbar are pretty good ideas.

Newsgator just announced a beta of their toolbar today.

With the Attensa browser toolbar you can:

- identify all of the feeds available on a page- preview the feed and articles to see if you want to subscribe- subscribe with a click- access all of your feeds and articles in your browser- tag articles and synchronize with del.icio.us

The Chiclet problem surfaces at the Syndicator Blog. The rash of badges is totally out of hand.

Attensa has another approach to finding feeds and easily subscribing from a Web page or blog from your browser.

We use a toolbar in IE or Firefox to identify feeds and to let you see what kinds of articles are available before deciding to subscribe. This eliminates the need to clutter a page with branded badges. On the one hand this may not be the brightest marketing move on Attensa's part... but it sure makes sense from a user's perspective.

I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.

OK.

I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...

I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.

Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!

I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.

Tip:Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.

There's a project at Attensa called Project Dogfood. We've set up internal wikis and blogs to help us track fast moving projects, collaborate a little more cleanly and to give everyone on the team experience applying Enterprise 2.0 tools to our real world programs and projects.

Part of the motivation for Project Dogfood comes from our work with Six Apart. After sitting through three Business Blogging seminars, you can't help get caught up in Anil Dash's enthusiasm and wanting to apply the practical pointers on approaching business blogs that flow from DL Byron.

As part of Project Dogfood, I wanted to get more people involved in telling the Attensa story. I'd like to introduce Michelle, our customer service lead and author of the Flog Blog posts. I've asked Michelle to share her knowledge of Attensa for Outlook to help people get more out of the 1.5 beta.

We'll be sharing more about our learnings from Project Dogfood as soon as I flog the next victim into blogging.

We are frequently asked about the impact of Outlook 2007 on Attensa for Outlook. Tris Hussey shares his experience using Outlook 2007 here. Tris is the Director of Strategic Partner Relations and unofficial Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana software, a great blog editing tool that I'm using.

I'll spoil it for you by jumping to the punchline. Tris has gone back to Outlook 2003 but supercharging it with X1 desktop search and Attensa for Outlook 1.5 for feed reading.

Tris has been using the Attensa for Outlook 1.5 beta instead of FeedDemon for about a week and has this to say. "Attensa. I think they are on to something here...I think my feed scanning is getting better."

Michael Gotta of the Burton Group sums up the role of Web feeds and attention in addressing two of the major issues facing IT organizations and information workers.

"Providing users with the right information, at the right time, in the right context has been the holy grail for IT organizations. At the same time, users have been frustrated with either too much information, too little information, information that isn't timely and information that isn't relevant."

Attensa is announcing two new products that address these issues head-on.

For enterprises and IT organizations, Attensa is introducing the Attensa Feed Server, the first Enterprise Feed Server Appliance. The Attensa Feed Server is an appliance that can be easily installed behind the firewall and enables IT administrators to easily set up and manage feeds for groups and individuals enabling improved collaboration and knowledge sharing.

For knowledge workers, Attensa is announcing the public beta of a new version of Attensa for Outlook, the first RSS reader utilizing AttentionStream technology to automatically prioritize information based on the user’s behavior history to automatically bring the most important RSS feeds and articles to the top.

Charlie Wood interviewed
Matthew Bookspan, Attensa's Director of Product Management and KnowNow's CTO Ron
Rasmussen for his first podcast. It’s solid overview on the state of the
enterprise RSS market, how companies are using RSS and the road ahead.

The
audio makes everyone sound like they are in a Warner Brother’s cartoon but
stick with it.

At Syndicate in New York we gave a preview of Attensa for Outlook 1.5, the first version of Attensa for
Outlook that uses our AttentionStream technology to automatically and
intelligently prioritize RSS feeds and articles and bring the subscriptions and
articles you find most interesting to the top. We said the public beta
would be announced in June. We were off by about two weeks.

We are
opening the public beta today and we’d like to invite you to give Attensa for
Outlook a try.

Attensa’s
predictive ranking AttentionStream™ technology continuously observes and
analyzes explicit and implicit behavior as you read and process RSS articles.
By constantly analyzing AttentionStream™ data, including the time and
frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, RSS
articles can be displayed in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that
they will be of interest to you. Feed priorities are constantly refined as the
continuous stream of attention is processed.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 lets you choose how you want your feeds and
articles presented.

Subscriptions can be displayed in a "River of News" view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds you
subscribe to.

Articles can be read in order of importance based on:

Priority – This view uses Predictive Ranking to intelligently predict which subscriptions and articles will be most important to you at any given time.

Favorites – Articles are displayed based on which subscriptions are read most frequently and consistently. In addition to viewing prioritized list based on AttentionStream analysis. You can manually rank feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of their subscription lists.

Date - This view displays articles based on the most recently updated newsfeeds.

Of course, you can also read their articles using a standard Outlook
view.

If
Outlook is the first application you open in the morning and the last one you close at
night, you need Attensa for Outlook, the RSS reader designed for business users
looking for an easy to use, secure RSS reader for Outlook that helps track and
monitor critical business information… automatically.

Participate
in the beta - Give and Get

Active
contributors to the beta program will get a free copy of the finished product.

Once you experiment with Attensa for Outlook you'll probably have suggestions for features and improvements. We've
set up an Attensa for
Outlook 1.5 beta forum where you can post bug reports and provide
feedback.

We gave Charlie Wood an overview our Attensa Enterprise RSS server yesterday and he has a great write-up on Moonwatcher.

We're planning a July launch of our server which includes RSS proxy services, a web-based reader, optional integration
with Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, and support for secure
feeds.

To simplfiy installation and configuration we'll be offering the server as an appliance. The major advantage of shipping a pre-integrated hardware appliance is
the dramatically simplified install and config process. It's built on Linux, Apache, Tomcat, PHP, and an open-source database, and includes all of those components out of the box.

For the first time since we introduced Attensa nearly one year ago we are delivering on the promise of less is more. At Syndicate we are previewing Attensa for Outlook 1.5 which displays feeds and articles in the order you want to read them.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 uses a

“river of news” to simulate a single news feed,
regardless of how many RSS feeds the user has subscribed to.

Version 1.5 uses our predictive ranking AttentionStream™
technology. By continuously analyzing implicit and explicit AttentionStream™
data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles
read, deleted and ignored, RSS articles can be displayed in a prioritized list
based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader at another
time.

Feed priorities are constantly refined as the continuous stream of
attention is processed.Articles can be
read in order of predictive ranking, sorted by date or customized by the user. This
new version of Attensa for Outlook gives users the control to manually rank
feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of
their subscription lists.Attensa for Outlook 1.5 synchronizes with the new
Microsoft RSS Platform. By leveraging the Microsoft Common Feed Store, RSS
feeds added using Attensa for Outlook, Internet Explorer 7 or Windows Vista,
will automatically be synchronized for a seamless user experience.